Physics colloquium set for March 29

Friday, March 29, 2013 at 4:00pm

Stephon Alexander from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College, will discuss "The Cosmological and Gravitational Consequences of a Parity Violating Universe" at 4 p.m. Friday, March 29, during a physics colloquium.

He will discuss the possibility that two important paradigms -- cosmic inflation and the matter-antimatter asymmetry -- are connected to each other. In particular, he will demonstrate theoretically that, if the universe underwent a phase of cosmic-inflation where parity is violated in general relativity, it is possible to generate the observed baryon assymetry necessary for structure formation. It is possible, he says, if general relativity is extended to encode parity violation via the Chern-Simons extension that arises naturally from quantum gravity corrections in general.